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Brian Lehrer: Brian Lehrer on WNYC. Now the case for getting tech out of the classroom, are devices and screens in K through 12 classrooms doing more harm than good, even when educators think they're deploying them in the service of education? That's a question posed by a recent New York Times opinion column, which highlights the drawbacks with tech in schools, things like distraction and the potential for exposure to inappropriate content.

The piece describes how a group of parents in San Luis Obispo, California, for example, successfully lobbied to block YouTube on school-issued laptops after discovering that students were using it during class. It also discusses the lack of oversight and evidence that tech companies and their products improve educational outcomes despite the millions of dollars spent by schools on software and services.

The article concludes that it's time to reframe the conversation around tech in schools and consider the long-term impact on students' critical thinking skills and overall well-being. The piece is headlined Get Tech Out of the Classroom Before It's Too Late, and it's from opinion writer Jessica Grose, who joins me now. Hi, Jessica. Welcome back to WNYC. Glad you could join us.

Jessica Grose: Hi. Thanks so much for having me. I'm really happy to be here.

Brian Lehrer: Listeners, we'll open up the phones on this right away. Educators, parents, where do you stand on this? How do tech and screens benefit your children or students and what are the drawbacks? 212-433-WNYC. You can weigh in on particular devices in schools, or as our guest, Jessica Grose poses the question in her recent column, get tech out of the classroom before it's too late. Oh, I'm posing the question. Should we get tech out of the classroom, and what does too late mean? 212-433-WNYC, 212-433-9692, call or text.

I guess we can dive right in one line from your piece. "One way or another, we've allowed Big Tech's tentacles into absolutely every aspect of our children's education." For people not intimately involved in this, how deep do those tentacles reach?

Jessica Grose: It's just a caveat to begin with. It is tough to make generalizations of the tens of thousands of different schools in the country and knowing that within schools, even within districts, one teacher in the same building might be using tech in an entirely different way than a teacher next to them. That is part of the problem in a lot of places. There's not best practices that are accepted by everyone. That caveat to begin with, Google and Apple, in particular, for over a decade have been getting their devices into schools.

My colleague, Natasha Singer, ran a piece in 2017, and I believe the statistic was that Chromebooks were already in 50% of American public schools at that point. Then obviously 2020 happens and there is a rush to make everything completely remote, and then it becomes an equity issue where kids cannot access education at all unless they're on screens. To generalize, once we came back into schools in person, and that happened at different times across the country, I think there wasn't always a very strategic way that schools were thinking about how they would integrate tech into their day-to-day.

An example I heard frequently was during 2020 and 2021, all of the curriculum became digital. There were no more textbooks, there were no more books. For cost reasons, districts would say, "Okay, well, now everything is digital. We're going to keep everything digital. We are not going to have paper textbooks anymore. We are not going to have books even-- replacing books even for the youngest learners."

I think one part of this discussion that's really important is understanding what is developmentally appropriate for children. You're not going to have the same use cases for a second grader as you would for a 12th grader. Once people were back in the classroom, there wasn't always a thoughtful reframing and rethinking of what the screens were for and how we were using them. I would hear about children as young as kindergarten only reading on iPads.

There is actually research showing that people do not retain knowledge as well when they are reading digitally as when they are reading in paper books. It's all over the place, basically, but in every subject at every grade, there are, in my mind, ways that tech is being misused and overused. It's not happening uniformly, but it is happening enough that I think we really need to hit pause and reassess.

Brian Lehrer: Take us a little bit more into the research that you just cited on those youngest kids and retention of what people read on screens versus what they read in paper books because that might be new to a lot of people. Some people might think, "Well, of course, we like the feel of having a physical object for our little kids, even for adults, and not have everything be on screens, but if the goal is to teach as many kids to read as in the early grades as possible, and school districts always have finite resources and so you don't have to perhaps buy a whole new crop of readers for the littlest kids, all those books every year, if you just have the software, what's so bad about--"

Almost everybody has a device these days, and that device can grow with them at least for a number of years. You said there are Chromebooks in half the schools now, Chromebook being a Google laptop or tablet. Why doesn't it work if that, let's say, saves money and makes everything more ubiquitously distributable to kids of all kinds of income backgrounds and everything else? What's wrong with that?

Jessica Grose: Well, there is a difference for reading performance and learning to read. The cognition that's happening, and I'm not an expert on neuroscience and I'm not an expert on literacy, but as I understand it, you do not take in the information in the same way when you're reading on paper and when you're reading on a screen. That's not even talking about the potential for distraction.

One of the things that came up over and over again was that even in districts where they're trying to block harmful material or distracting material, the kids are smart and can figure out a way around the filters. There's constant potential for distraction that just isn't there when you are reading off paper. It's more efficient to read off paper. The term is metacognition. There are benefits for paper reading. It is better.

Again, the best uses that I heard over and over again from teachers and experts is using the technology as a supplement and a tool not as the main use day to day unless there is a compelling reason. It really depends on the subject. It depends on exactly what you're doing. You always have to be weighing the potential for distraction from the task that you actually want the kids to be doing and--

Brian Lehrer: On the-- Oh, go ahead. Do you want to finish your answer? Sorry.

Jessica Grose: Oh, no, no, no. No, that was enough. [chuckles]

Brian Lehrer: Well, on what you said at the end of that distraction, as I mentioned in the intro, you're right about a group of parents in San Luis Obispo in California who worked to get YouTube blocked from students' devices at school. Tell us that story.

Jessica Grose: Because there actually isn't a lot of good research on the granular ways and the specific ways teachers are using tech day to day in their classrooms, I launched a survey with The New York Times and I got about a thousand responses from teachers and from parents about what they were experiencing. One of the parents who wrote to me was a woman named Jamie Lewis from San Luis Obispo, California.

She and a bunch of other parents had been really horrified by how distracted their kids were during class because the Chromebooks were always out and the kids could access YouTube. There were filters on the YouTube, but what had gotten through the filters was really disturbing to them. The example that really sticks with me is clips from A Clockwork Orange, which is-

Brian Lehrer: Oh, boy.

Jessica Grose: -a sort of historically disturbing movie. They were watching-- and because the Chromebooks show you the history, they could prove that the kids were watching things like this during class. Then what the kids can do with the school-issued Chromebooks at home, that's a whole other can of worms that we can also get into because there's the homework. Parents so often would say to me, "I'm really trying to limit my kid's screen time, but if all their homework is on the Chromebook, what am I supposed to do? I can't limit it. I have to allow them, even though I see them being distracted endlessly." It is really, really tricky.

She showed her superintendent this video compilation that she had made of all of these clips that the kids had been watching during class time, and the leadership of their school district, to their credit, was really horrified. They really didn't know the extent. I think when you know you're going to appear in The New York Times, that probably lights a little bit of a fire.

When I called the superintendent to follow up on what I had heard, he told me that the district was making the decision to take YouTube off the devices starting May 1st, and if teachers need to access YouTube for videos that they want to show, the teachers will have that capability. I think, often, there are really fine-tuning ways to allow kids to have what they need on these devices without just opening them up completely. There are settings that you can make that allow the teachers to be able to show the YouTube without giving kids the access to the YouTube.

I do not envy teachers and administrators right now. It is really challenging, especially. They're still dealing with the fallout of the early COVID years, and there are so many problems that they have to deal with day to day. I understand that they might not be thinking of the fine-tuning every single setting on every single piece of software that they have on these devices. Unfortunately, to have the best outcomes and to keep kids from just being totally distracted all the time, I think a lot of thought really needs to be put into how these things are being used.

Brian Lehrer: You know what looks really interesting, Jessica? I think we have two callers, and our lines are full, you could imagine. I think we have callers with different points of view on this as it relates to students with disabilities. Let me take first [unintelligible 00:12:08] in Pleasantville in Westchester. You're on WNYC. Hello, [unintelligible 00:12:13].

Caller 1: Hello.

Brian Lehrer: What you got?

Caller 1: I am a related service provider in Northern Manhattan. That means I see a variety of grades, and then sometimes I go into the classroom. I'm also a career changer, so I was recently in school. The big concept in social education is before you get to accommodations, you look at the environment and you say, "Is this environment actually a disabling environment?"

As I entered the workforce, that just kept popping into my head, especially with my middle schoolers. I'm not even talking about YouTube. I'm talking about things like Google Docs, Google Slides, PowerPoint. There are so many steps and so many frustrations between the child and the material. By the time they get to the material, they're often so upset and frustrated that they either don't remember what they're talking about. The teacher is also frustrated because they've been walking around the room trying to troubleshoot.

You can see how much space we've put in between the child's mind and the actual educational material. That is really just the things that are designed to be part of the actual curriculum themselves are distracting, and I really feel often disabling.

Brian Lehrer: Thank--

Jessica Grose: I think that's such an amazing point.

Brian Lehrer: Go ahead, Jessica.

Jessica Grose: Yes, that's such an amazing--

Brian Lehrer: You want to follow up with her?

Jessica Grose: Yes, that's such an amazing point. I'm doing a final piece in the series about solutions that's going to run next week. Some of the educators that I talked to describe that during the pandemic, kids would say things like, "I don't even know where to look on my screen because there's too many things to look at, and I'm so confused about where I can even fix my attention."

That's absolutely something that I've heard from educators who are trying to rethink how we even use these things that I think, especially in high schools, are totally basic and accepted as part of the curriculum. Everybody uses Google Docs and Google Classroom now.

Brian Lehrer: [unintelligible 00:14:33], thank you for sharing your experience. I think that was really important, but Van in Midwood may have a very different take. Van, you're on WNYC. Hello.

Van: Hey, Brian. I listen to you every day. You're awesome. I definitely have a different take in support of use of technology. I'm actually legally blind, and so I'm a parent with a disability, and my son has ADD, which he's had for 15 years now at varying levels of management. To me, not using technology is actually ableist, in my opinion, because a lot of what I work on stuff or talk to my son about it, I'm sharing screens or I'm video calling different people. That's one point. The other point I want to say-- or two more points.

One other point I want to make is paper books, actually, to me, it's not clear how that is better because with a digital book, my son annotates, he copies and pastes, and shares things with people with me to get feedback, so there's more interaction. The last piece is paper things can't be tracked. Just like your speaker has mentioned that digital things can be a distraction, digital things can be tracked.

If someone is sitting in a classroom, you don't know if they're actually reading what's on the paper, but you can tell what they're doing on a digital format. You can ask questions and you can see if they're answering the questions digitally. I think it has better oversight.

Brian Lehrer: Jessica, your thoughts?

Jessica Grose: Well, on that first point, I totally agree with you, and that's why we shouldn't have a one-size-fits-all solution. In the second piece in this series, I talked about benefits, and I'm just going to quote from a special education support teacher in Oregon. "Technology can be a necessity for students with special needs in assessing core curriculum and standards, as well as for fluency practice." He also mentions for students with dysgraphia and dyslexia, word-processing tools offer a meaningful way to demonstrate and assess their writing skills.

Obviously, there are really compelling use cases, not just for students with special needs or disabilities, but for all students. It's really not one size fits all. I would say, yes, certainly there are some benefits to being able to read on screens and getting that feedback, but a teacher who has that has command of their classroom knows what's going on in that classroom. I really worry about digital privacy for students because everything is tracked. Everything is tracked and permanent in a way that I think isn't exactly fair to students, and they can't consent to their data being used or potentially misused.

That's something I haven't even really addressed in this series yet and I think is really troubling, and I don't think has been necessarily really thought through in the ubiquity of a lot of these technologies in the classroom.

Brian Lehrer: Van, thank you. Keep calling us. We're getting some texts that are also trying to apply a kind of middle ground here, I guess. Listener writes, "Should we be framing this as getting internet out of the classroom rather than tech? The tech is important; smart boards, word processors, et cetera. The internet is what is so harmful without regulation." Another one takes issue with the idea that kids don't retain as well on screens as when they're reading on paper books. This one listener claims that the research shows the opposite of that.

Here's another one. Let's see. Where'd this go? We're getting them so fast. "Tablets, computers help students better prepare for a world immersed in technology. Once a student is taught how to use it, students that learn technology skills early in life will be better prepared to pursue relevant careers later in life." Another one says, "What about the Kindle, which is not connected to the internet? It's just a very convenient book reader." You hear some of those pushback this-tech-but-not-that-tech text messages that are coming in.

Jessica Grose: I really want to push back pretty hard on the workplace preparedness part of it because, number one, anything that the kids are using now will be obsolete in 5 to 10 years. Secondly, when we were young, there was a technology class that was 45 minutes a day. Why does it have to be in absolutely every single aspect of learning, whether or not it improves the outcomes or improves the experience? I think we need to ask hard questions in every subject about whether these devices are actually helping.

The last thing I'll say, PowerPoint came up so much, and it is not a hard program to use. My third grader taught herself how to use it. These are very accessible programs. The idea that you need to have the screens up constantly, constantly, constantly in order for this vague idea of workforce preparedness when the technology is consistently moving forward, you just don't need all of that much time every single day to have kids have a familiarity with the devices, to have the kids know enough so if they want to pursue certain career paths, they will not be stymied from those career paths. I do think that is a bit of a red herring in this conversation.

Brian Lehrer: Alina in Brooklyn, you're on WNYC. Hi, Alina.

Alina: Oh, hi. Thanks for taking my call. I think that this is a really important issue and you should connect this to the citywide reading mandate or literacy mandate NYC Reads. As part of that, HMH, which is a giant company, has gotten a huge contract with the city to teach kids how to read. Most of the material is online. My daughter reports that instead of bringing actual physical books home, the kids are on computers, not reading the real book, but reading excerpts.

What my daughter says about her fifth-grade class is that instead of actually reading, the kids are just navigating away from the page and doing other stuff. It is a huge concern. To have a second and first grader reading online and not bringing home a physical book, they used to bring home book baggies, is very, very, very disturbing. One other thing that has to be looked into is the issue of the data.

There's a program as part of this thing that was implemented in our district, District 20. The kids were told they all had to do this. It's called Beable. It's a Big Tech company that has a contract with the city that is collecting data from students about their career interests, supposedly to match them with literacy that aligns to their career. Parents were not given consent forms, and the kids were made to do this in school, and we have no idea where all that data and information is going. This is very--

Brian Lehrer: Alina, do I hear from the two examples of contracts that you brought up that one of your underlying points here is that this transition from physical books to screens is being driven by money more than educational decisions?

Alina: Absolutely. That is the part that has to be looked into. The problem is not tech. The problem is Big Tech, as in corporate Big Tech, that is getting into our public schools, taking our taxpayer money, taking data from public school children, and doing we don't know what all in the name of supposedly saying that we're educating them. It's highly, highly problematic. I do not want my kid reading an excerpt on a computer provided by a big company. I want them coming home with a book and reading a book.

Brian Lehrer: Alina, thank you. Thank you very much. We're just about out of time, Jess, but I want to make sure that we ask the equity question here explicitly because a lot of students may not have access to devices or reliable internet. Even in cases where the school is distributing the devices, as we've heard a few stories of, they may not have the same internet access, the same speed of internet access, the same reliability of internet access at home for homework, right?

Jessica Grose: Right. Excellent point. I say in the first piece as well, often, and this is anecdotal, there is no research that would be able to tell me this, but from what I have heard, schools that are serving wealthier students tend to have a lower-tech approach. It is unusual to find that absolutely everything is on screens. I also wonder if it's time to have a conversation where, will it someday become an equity issue in the other direction, whereas wealthier kids will have access to paper books and they will have time to clear their minds and they will have teaching from actual physical teachers in their rooms and less privileged children will have everything on screens, they will have only AI?

Again, this sounds fantastical, but it is a future that seems potentially not that far off, and it is not a future that I would like to see.

Brian Lehrer: Reinforcing something you just said, I will throw in one more text message from a listener. They wrote, "In my very selective, elite Manhattan Elementary School, students have tech only in the computer lab and teachers book classes at the lab to integrate into lessons. 90% of classwork and homework are analog. These are very high-performing students."

It reinforces that point about-- you said private schools. This says elite. It doesn't say public or private, but I think making the same point that, in a way, maybe those with the most resources are having the luxury to use less tech.

Jessica Grose: Exactly. I think that's where we are right now.

Brian Lehrer: There we leave it for now with Jessica Grose, G-R-O-S-E, New York Times opinion writer. Her piece, Get Tech Out of the Classroom Before It's Too Late. If you go to her page on the New York Times site, you'll see that's one of several articles in a series about this. Jessica, thank you.

Jessica Grose: Thanks so much for having me.

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